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Turks & Tolerance
Putting Islamist victory in Turkey in context.

By Joshua Treviño

The ballots are in, and the Turkish electorate this week decisively
reelected Recep Tayyip Erdogan to a second term as prime minister in Ankara.
Erdogan’s Islamist Justice and Development party rose to power — first as
the Welfare Party, till it was forcibly disbanded, and then in its current
guise — amid fears that it would depart from the Kemalist vision that
undergirds the modern Turkish state. (The party is more commonly known by
its Turkish acronym, “AK.”) Certainly it did not help that he was prone to
public statements such as, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our
helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers,” nor that
he has declared that he seeks God’s forgiveness each time he shakes hands
with a woman. When Westerners envision Muslim leaders with whom they may do
business, Prime Minister Erdogan is not the sort who comes to mind. Still
less, despite his stated ambition for his country, are he and his the men
who will lead Turkey into Brussels’ version of “Europe.”

But if Turkey’s elected leadership seems an unwelcome religious throwback
after decades of familiar generals and gray-suited bureaucrats, and if
Turkey itself has not been a model of pluralist democracy under AK rule,
neither has it slid backward into the much-feared Islamist grand vision. The
popular metaphor for Turkey has it poised between two worlds: Europe on the
one side, and Asia on the other. The media narrative in the U.S. and Europe
would have us believe that Erdogan and the AK party represent the latter,
drawing Turkey away from us in its ambition and program. Their opponents,
therefore, are our friends, or at least are benign toward the West. This
narrative is simple and comprehensible. It is also false.

The reality is that Turkish state and society are precariously balanced
between three distinct visions: the aggressive chauvinism of its Kemalist
founding; the Islamist ambitions of its resurgent religious consciousness;
and the secularist ambitions of its burgeoning entrepreneurial and urban
classes. Each of these strands has its pull, and barring unlikely
catastrophe, none will wholly dominate the others. For all the ink spilled
over the pros and cons of Islamist rule in Turkey, it is the Kemalist
element that represents the most meaningful threat to a Turkey that may join
Europe. Understanding that threat is key to understanding AK’s victory this
past weekend.

The maverick Turkish historian Taner Akçam, in his book From Empire to
Republic, explains the basic premises of the Kemalist worldview. Turkish
nationalism as expounded by Mustafa Kemal, better known as Atatürk, arose in
the context of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. The empire’s loss of
territory in Africa and the Arab Middle East was discouraging, but not
nearly so traumatic as its dramatic rollback in Europe, where millions of
Turks and Islamized Europeans lived. (Atatürk himself was a native of the
now-Greek city of Thessaloniki.) As the empire tottered and fell, the
Entente powers of the First World War decided to extend the process of
dismemberment to Turkey’s Anatolian heartland. The Allies occupied Istanbul;
Woodrow Wilson advocated an Armenian state on the eastern third of modern
Turkey; France and Italy attempted to carve up southwestern Asia Minor; and
most famously, Greece landed an invasion force at Smyrna (modern Izmir) and
advanced nearly to Ankara in pursuit of a reborn Byzantine Empire. It was
only the organizational and political genius of Mustafa Kemal that saved
Turks from having nothing more than a rump state deep in the interior: He
cowed the Allies into abandoning the country, and crushed the Greeks in a
campaign that ended in the massacre of thousands on the quays of Smyrna.

The lesson that Kemal’s Turkish nationalists drew from the trauma of their
republic’s birth was twofold: first, that religion in public life is a
retrograde force; second, that non-Turks are a tremendous existential danger
to Turkey. This outlook contained in itself its own contradiction: the
definition of a “Turk” in this context is a Muslim who speaks Turkish. Given
the polyglot nature of the Ottoman Empire, this means that those considered
Turks are not all ethnically Turkish: Slavic, Caucasian, Arab, and Greek
blood are all part of the national heritage. Thus, the Kemalist project
attempted to simultaneously suppress faith, and posit faith as the defining
characteristic of national identity. Though the state formally recognized
non-Muslim citizens, it also suppressed and expelled them as much as
possible, in a process beginning with the expulsion of Greeks from Asia
Minor in 1923, continuing with the pogrom eliminating the Greek community of
Istanbul in 1955, and proceeding into the modern day with the slow push to
eliminate the Orthodox Christian Patriarchate in Istanbul. Muslim citizens
of the Turkish state would receive similar treatment if they dared seek
autonomy — see the Kurds for a prime example — but if they refrained, they
were generally left to pursue a quiet existence, as the thriving Arab
population of Antakya, near the Syrian border, testifies.

The baleful effects of this sort of nationalism are on display today.
Religious freedom is severely restricted, and the country has a history of
outright prohibition of missionary activity. As previously noted, the
Turkish state actively seeks to eliminate the patriarch, senior bishop of
the world’s Orthodox Christians, whose place of office has been in Istanbul
since a millennium before the Turks conquered that city. A combination of
legal restrictions and tightening controls mean that the pool of
state-approved candidates for the patriarchate is rapidly shrinking, and
unless these policies change, there will probably be no one left to become
Patriarch before this century ends. The slow ending of an ancient Christian
institution may seem, in the modern media narrative, an ambition of
Islamists, and perhaps it is: but the responsibility here is squarely on
Turkey’s Kemalist heritage, and its legacy of nationalist paranoia.

It is not merely the patriarchate that is under threat: Anyone deviating
from the accepted mode of Kemalist Turkishness is liable to harassment or
worse. Turkish converts to Christianity Hakan Tastan and Turan Topal are
presently on trial under Article 301, a newly drafted (as of 2005) Kemalist
legal legacy that prohibits “insulting Turkishness.” Turkish media fixture
Kemal Kerincsiz, who is participating in the case, has told the press,
“Christian missionaries working almost like terrorist groups are able to
enter into high schools and among primary school students … They deceive our
children with beautiful young girls.” Though this may sound like Islamist
rhetoric, the impetus for the prosecution comes from nationalist adherents
of Kemalism who are vastly more concerned with the protection of Turkey than
the defense of Islam. Kerincsiz himself represents an element of Kemalism so
zealous that he regularly seeks the prosecution of Muslim Turks who do not
hew to the strict Kemalist line: the authors Elif Safak and Orhan Pamuk are
among many hauled before courts in recent years to defend their fidelity to
Turkishness.

For all their misfortunes, at least Tastan, Topal, Shafak, and Pamuk are
alive. Father Andrea Santoro, a Roman Catholic priest, is not: He was shot
dead in the Black Sea city of Trabzon by a Turkish youth motivated by a
mixture of nationalist and Islamist sympathies. An April 9, 2006, Washington
Post story on the killing laid forth in stark terms the perceived linkage
between Turkish patriotism and Islam:

[Isa Karatas, spokesman for Turkey’s perhaps 80 evangelical
Protestant churches], said fellow Turks often ask him: “‘If there is a war,
whose side are you going to fight on?’ I just couldn’t get them to
understand that even though I’m a Christian, my feeling for my country is
the same. They just don’t understand this.”

Behnan Konutgan, an official with the Bible Society in Turkey who
has said every Christian is obliged to spread the Good Word, has been
arrested repeatedly. “When I am preaching,” he said, “people think I’m an
enemy of the country.”

That the consequences of this perceived enmity are dire is illustrated in
more than just Fr. Santoro’s case. This past April, in the city of Malatya,
deep in the eastern Turkish interior, a German minister and two Turkish
Christians were tortured and murdered. A July 12, 2007, editorial in
Christianity Today described the horrifying event: “The two Christians were
bound hand and foot to chairs, and the Muslims began stabbing them, slowly
and deliberately … Finally, three hours after the torture began, police were
called. The captors then slit the Christians’ throats, killing all three.”
The killers’ note explaining the deed was not one of jihad, but of plain
Kemalist nationalism: “We did it for our country. They are trying to take
our country away, take our religion away.” Within days of the killings,
anonymous Turks sympathizing with the murders were reportedly threatening
media outlets in Ankara who dared report on the case.

Finally, the murder of Istanbul newspaper editor Hrant Dink has attracted
some notice in Western media. Dink was Turkish by citizenship, and Armenian
by ethnicity — and as such, he was something of an alien figure to both
milieus. He made his name by challenging the nationalist tropes of both
Turkey and Armenia, demanding that Turkey acknowledge its history of
repression, and asking Armenians to let go of their bitterness. For his
lifetime of effort, he was repeatedly put on trial, and on January 19th of
this year, he was shot dead by a Turkish nationalist youth named Ogün
Samast. The killer was swiftly apprehended by authorities clearly
sympathetic to his blow for Kemalism: on February 2nd, the Turkish
publication Radikal published photographs of Samast in custody, flanked by
smiling policemen as he hoisted a Turkish flag. A mere ten days before, a
hundred thousand Turks had turned out for Dink’s funeral in Istanbul. In the
throng were placards reading, “We are all Hrant Dink.”

The hundred thousand of Dink’s funeral are the hope of Turkey’s future: They
are the third element of the three-way struggle for the national destiny,
mostly young and mostly educated men and women who reject the paranoid
strictures and heavy-handed demands of Kemalist nationalism. This past
weekend, they mostly voted for Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AK party, not
because they are Islamists, but because in the Turkish context, it’s not the
Islamists who have brought repression to modern Turkey. Though it is true
that many of the incidents of Kemalist-inspired repression cited here
occurred under Islamist governments in Ankara, past and present, it must be
understood that the Turkish parallel state, in which the military and
nationalist elder figures assume the role of guardian of the republic,
remains tremendously strong — and the Kemalist ethic is profoundly powerful
and enduring. Even in leadership, the AK party is not able to impose a
non-Kemalist society upon Turkey any more than American Democrats may work
their unfettered will as a Congressional majority.

Our true friends in Turkey are neither the Kemalist nationalists nor the
Islamists, but the post-nationalist secularists who enliven Istanbul’s
trendy districts, populate the Aegean resorts, and produce the literary
genius of the likes of Pamuk. For now, that group has endorsed the AK
party’s Islamists. It is a choice we should respect — even as we hope for
more.

This is not to be naïve or starry-eyed about Erdogan or the Islamists. They
may proclaim their desire to join the European Union, and they may model
themselves after the Christian Democrats in Europe. But Islam and
Christianity make rather different claims on the state and society; and we
should have enough experience with political Islam by now to regard it with
wary skepticism until given reason to trust. And — let us note — we do not
know whether, in a generation’s time, Turkish minorities may still be
repressed, only in Islam’s name rather than Mustafa Kemal’s. This is
regrettably possible, but it is not inevitable. If Recep Tayyip Erdogan
wants to show that it will not happen, than he would do well to begin by
listening to the message of the hundred thousand of Hrant Dink. He could
give the patriarchate in Istanbul its liberty; he could give Hakan Tastan
and Turan Topal their freedom; and he could seek the old Ottoman tradition
of social pluralism over the Kemalist legacy of homogenization. It would not
be an easy thing for him to do — but it would be right.

— Joshua Treviño is the vice president for public policy at the Pacific
Research Institute in San Francisco, California. He has professional
experience in the Muslim world in Asia and Africa. In fall 2006, he led a
delegation to attend the papal-patriarchal events in Istanbul, Turkey.